from The Nation, February 12 1990 Not-So-Hot Tamales It was Col. Mike Snell who first told

from The Nation, February 12 1990
Not-So-Hot Tamales
It was Col. Mike Snell who first told the press that his boys had found
fifty pounds of cocaine hidden in a freezer in Manuel Noriega's house. Gen
Maxwell Thurman later upgraded the haul to fifty kilos. Now, buried on the
inside pages of the papers comes an admission by the Pentagon that the
substance in question was not cocaine at all, but tamales wrapped in banana
leaves.
In his tour of Noriega's quarters, "Mad Max" (the sobriquet is commonplace in
the European press, if not here) presented a sleazy set of exhibits -- a
portrait of Hitler and a bust of Napoleon, exotic weaponry, red underwear and
"a collection of off-color stuff." The soldiers were "stunned by what they
saw," the Defense Department said. "Soldiers aren't used to an awful lot." Be
serious: What do they read in bed at Fort Bragg, _The Economist_?
American virtue and innocence in an ugly world has been the sustaining
narrative of the Panama invasion, and it is now used as a defense in the tamale
episode. "The guys who first saw the stuff did not kow what cocaine was," the
Pentagon says. But the issue is less the na‹vet‚ of our cornfed boy soldiers
than the gullibility of our more worldly reporters, who swallow all this
nonsense with never a word of protest and then show no greater skepticism when
the Pentagon repackages its clash between good and evil -- Noriega is now said
to have used the tamales for unspeakable acts of witchcraft and voodoo.
Yet this incident may be the first sign that the pulp fiction demonology of
the Penama invasion is unraveling. If the cocaine never existed, what else was
faked? Is the legal case against Noriega too flimsy to sustain in court, too
dependent on an inept prosecutor and the tainted testimony of convicted drug
dealers? Were the dirty pictures really family snapshots? Was the portrait of
Hitler really Charlie Chaplin?